Aggressive Reader and Submissive Spectator: A Revision of Self-Redescription

ABSTRACT

Both Richard Rorty and Siegfried Kracauer considered the question of self-redemption in an ideologically shelterless age; both thinkers realized that the spontaneous state of daily life is beguiling and that one needs to break out from it; and both sought to break the bond between Being and Thought. For Kracauer, redemption came from the strangeness of concrete physical reality presented by films. For Rorty, redemption stood for the strangeness of imaginative self-redescription achieved by reading books. Based on the analysis of Rorty’s aggressive book reader and of Kracauer’s submissive movie spectator, this article aims to answer the question: how can Kracauer’s redemption of physical reality contribute to Rorty’s self-redescription? Self-redescription paradoxically sustains the abstractness it fights against. The ironist’s flippant attitude toward language leads to the nonchalant and traumatic attitude toward life. Kracauer’s from-bottom-to-top approach to the redemption of physical reality can benefit Rorty’s self-redescription in three concrete ways: as a possible description, as a possible method, and as a possible attitude to life. The theological core of Kracauer’s redemption of physical reality enlightens Rorty’s ironist through the desubjectivized stance: to encounter existence in its purity, free of personal subjectivity, and thereby to find a de-anthropocentric world-view.

KEYWORDS:

• Richard Rorty
• Siegfried Kracauer
• redemption
• self-redescription
• physical reality

Notes

1. Kracauer, Theory of Film (TF), 291, 288; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

2. Rorty, “Redemption from Egotism” (“RE”), 244; Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (CIS), 148; hereafter page references to these two sources are cited in the text.

3. Kracauer, “Those Who Wait,” 136.

4. Ibid., 138. The second behaviour is that of “the short-circuit people” (138): human beings who “maintain their ground only artificially and thanks to involuntary self-deception”; “It is more a will to faith than a lingering within faith, more a rash interpretation than an accomplished fact” (137).

5. Hasen, “‘With Skin and Hair’,” 456.

6. In How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom points out that “The ultimate answer to the question ‘Why read?’ is that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self” (195). Citing this sentence at the beginning of “Redemption from Egotism,” Rorty states: “Bloom’s thesis about how to attain this sort of autonomy chimes with my claim that the replacement of religion and philosophy by literature is a change for the better” (244).

7. The one time Rorty mentions movies in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is for their role in changing public morality: “That is why the novel, the movie, and the TV program have, gradually but steadily, replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress” (xvi). Later he completely forgets movies: “The actual role of novels, poems, plays, paintings, statues, and buildings in the social movements of the last century and a half has given it [the Romantic claim that art had replaced religion and philosophy] still greater plausibility” (3). We can imagine that even Rorty considers the movie a useful tool for self-redescription, yet what he has in mind is the feature film, which is what Kracauer objects to.

8. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, 375.

9. Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 14.

10. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 48.

11. Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, 111.

12. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, 50.

13. Rorty, Philosophy of Richard Rorty, 3.

14. Rorty, “Nineteenth-Century Idealism and Twentieth-Century Textualism,” 131.

15. Llanera, “Richard Rorty and the Concept of Redemption,” 112–13.

16. Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’,” 459.

17. Kracauer admits in Theory of Film, that the distinction is not strict, for “A face on the screen may attract us as a singular manifestation of fear or happiness regardless of the events which motivate its expression. A street serving as a background to some quarrel or love affair may rush to the fore and produce an intoxicating effect” (303).

18. Frazier, “Kierkegaard on the Problems of Pure Irony,” 434.

19. Ibid., 444. For example, radical self-redescription sustains the prevailing unconstrained neoliberal permissiveness: One may enjoy whatever it may be to satisfy one’s needs and to achieve full self-realization and self-fulfillment.

20. Caputo, “Thought of Being,” 673; Topper, Disorder of Political Inquiry, 964.

21. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 360;

22. Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 38, 133.

23. Pettegrew, Pragmatist’s Progress, 108; Curtis, Defending Rorty, 95; Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 284.

24. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 7.

25. Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, 108.

26. Ibid., 201.

27. There is a distinctly theological component in Kracauer’s redemption of physical reality. His from bottom to top approach, as Koch writes in Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction, is based on Jewish theology according to which the transposition in perspective caused by “disfigurement” must be made good in the sense that the bend in a spoon seen in a glass of water can be mended not by touching the spoon, but simply by waiting for the water to flow away. The idea of redemption is deeply bound up with anamnestic solidarity, the dedicated commemoration of the dead, together with whom we wait for the day when the Messiah will come, the day when justice will be done to the dead (106).

28. Hansen, “‘With Skin and Hair’,” 443.

29. Koch, Siegfried Kracauer, 105.

30. Rorty, “The Fire of Life,” 520–21.

31. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?” 116, 106.

32. Ibid., 106.

33. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 13.

34. Rorty, “Philosophy as a Transitional Genre,” 478. Rorty and Kracauer hold opposite views. Whereas Rorty emphasizes thought and language, in which words, uprooted from their bond to physical reality and to history, have only internal relationships with other words, Kracauer emphasizes physical reality, which excludes all subjective participation and linguistic creation and traps man in a sphere of physical reality. Regardless of their differences, what they share is a radicalness and weightlessness: both break the bond between Being and thought, and both favour a self-enclosed system. Kracauer stands for an alternative to Heidegger and Dewey for whom the bond of Being and thought cannot be broken. Heidegger, as he writes in Basic Writings, holds that man is always and already borne by Being, bonded to Being, held by Being, sustained by Being, and thought belongs essentially to Being (238–39). Dewey, as Friedman explains in “Dewey’s Naturalistic Metaphysics,” replaces the mind-matter dualism with experience, for nature is capable of generating values and meanings through human endeavors that draw on nature, including “religion, art, and science” (56).

35. Bernstein, “Richard Rorty’s Deep Humanism,” 22. Rorty regards Heidegger’s notion of the language of Being as a vestigial nostalgia for metaphysics. As Rorty points out in “Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth”: “I agree with Hook and Carnap, against Heidegger and Tillich, that the word “Being” is more trouble than it is worth. I would be happy if Heidegger had never employed it and if Tillich had never picked it up from Heidegger. But I do not think that the word ‘Being’ was essential to the thought of either” (71).

36. Schulenberg, “From Redescription to Writing,” 385.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xuelian He

Xuelian He is Associate Professor in the Institute of New Media at the Communication University of China, Beijing. She was a visiting scholar at the American University School of Communication during the 2012-2013 academic year. Her research focuses on aesthetics, psychoanalysis, new media and visual culture.